Reviews

Have a visual urge and don't trick yourself and the others of being a professional (an image worker)! What's the difference between making photography and shooting? The same as the difference between being a photographer and an image worker!

The etiquettes oblige to choose a camp and state a specialisation for nude, for portrait, for landscape, for action, for product, for documentary ...

Rethink the above as phases in your photographic art, as oscillating preferences (erratic obsessions) for classic (nude), for faces (portrait), for plains (landscape), for commotion (action), for stillness (product), for surveillance (documentary) …

The greatest danger, fear, nightmare, of all is that the viewer's interest will not exceed the time span needed for taking a picture. If there is no inner disturbance, if your instant record of untransformed reality does not create an enigma, a mind-twister (not twitter), then it will be a puff of visual smoke. Gone in a split second!

So what will it be? An image worker or an art disciple? A politically correct professional or a visionary rebel photographer?

Myself, I have a poster in front of me on the wall reminding me: "More provoking, less ethics, more aesthetics"!

To be cont'd

NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also through theirs.

After all those settings, do you still have time for making photography? Not the same as shooting! In what are they different? We will see this in Chapter 5 but in the meantime just think of the analogy with shagging and making love. Only a suffering part of humanity can see the difference and I am respecting it (not the same as understanding it always though).

Instead of over-preparing a picture, use your camera as these one-use plastic boxes (just a shutter button). I would speculate here to the point to affirm that PhoneCamera users have much more chances to make a breakthrough in modern photography.

As an intermediate-final word (mind you, oxymoron is the ultimate pre-set) do as you please, just bear in mind that there is a global conspiracy to keep your focus out of the essence, aside of the core. There is a continuous manipulation to put barriers to your talent and to your inspiration. Just a couple of them: Theory, magazines, critiques, personal trainers, shadows, tunnels, umbrellas, street performers, your own family pictures … your own family.

To be cont'd

NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also through theirs.

I had to fight with people who lapidate staged photographs. Why anger in front of such an image? It is compassion we should feel. Cannot imagine greater pain and suffering than those which a photographer feels when trying to construct from scratch a scene obssessing him/her and not finding it around!

What is staging if not artificially creating the mojo needed for the reverie to happen. Photography, in its strive to reach Arcadia, is constantly escaping the studio for the streets, and vice-versa.

And when you will find Arcadia, Utopia, the Urban pastoral where you wanted your art to live and breath, then use this land of lost content to chase away the demons. Eliminate instead of planting meanings, reduce instead of expanding, sow doubt instead of explaining.

To be cont'd

NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also through theirs.

A photograph in order to transcend must be able to trigger the imagination of both the educated and the ignorant viewer. The unknown has undoubtely more power in installing ignorance, essential to "reanimate" a conventional documentary image and confer an enigmatic reality.

At the other end of the visual communication there is the photographer trying to cultivate a visual literacy. A noble task, surely, but not without taking into account that our aesthetic values and feelings are there by intuition and a natural talent will always be able to detect a meaningful image. Wouldn't it be that the less the exposure to theory, the more the chances for an original expression to emerge?

Having said that, and if, albeit the warnings, you embark in a long educational "trip", don't trust KODAK's -you press the button, we do the rest-, don't adopt Buster Keaton's monkey cameraman, don't browse techno-magazines. Read Calvino instead, to help you build your own Rome around you, over and over again.

Change its alleys, transform its fountains, burn its skies, but never exchange your Rome for another city. If however, by force majeur, this is ever needed, then let it be Paris.

Author's note: Paris and Rome are by no means the real cities but the invisible space around us created through tales, narrations and libretti. They are mentioned here as a tribute to Calvino's Invisible Cities and to Baudelaire's flâneur.

To be cont'd

NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also through theirs.

Have a dream and project it, have a dream and protect it. Don't handicap it, don't adapt or detract from it, let it rawly impact you. Otherwise you will be serving the establishment. And who needs form in photography?

Or framing, or composition? Let your vision solve the image by itself, worry not about its limits, a photograph has seen to this by existing only within four angles.

And if the result is an almost simulacrum of your oneiric activity, no matter how fade or approximate, don't repeal it. Sharpness is the most futile and hostile of all imagination constituents.

By unleashing the impulse, without impediments (see chapter 10), the photographic mirage is realised in anticipation. Only then you press the (that) button.

And if someone will call your dream a distortion, just disdain knowing that metamorphosis is the only outcome of desire and passion.

To be cont'd

NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also through theirs.